In past years, individuals planning trips by automobile, bicycle, or similar means have employed paper maps with manually-highlighted routes for assistance in traveling from a departure point to a destination point. For example, business such as travel agencies, car rental firms, automobile clubs, and travel clubs often provide individuals with booklets of maps covering the regions to be travelled by the individuals, and will manually highlight a travel route which may be taken by the individuals. A major drawback of manually-drawn routes on paper maps is that it is costly and inefficient in terms of time and money because an individual must first determine which route to take between a departure point and destination point, and must then piece together a set of paper maps which cover the region to be travelled. Furthermore, if an individual wants to know places of interest, such as hotels, restaurants, and attractions, along the route, he or she must go through the time-consuming process of determining which places of interest are geographically located near the route.
As technology has become more sophisticated, computerized mapping systems have developed for assisting individuals in travel planning. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,954,958 to Savage et al. discloses a directional information system for enabling a user to determine a desired geographical route between supplied locations. The system generates routing directions in a language, such as English, for output to a user via such output devices as a telephone receiver, printer, or display screen. A drawback of the Savage system is that it does not visually output the route on a displayed map or on a printer.
Other computerized mapping systems for generating a route between a departure point and a destination point have displayed the generated route on a vector map. Vector-mapping draws a map on a display screen on the fly by reading from a massive database of geographic information. The geographic information includes shape information, such as latitude and longitude coordinates, to properly draw the location of roads, highways, hydrology, cities, etc. One drawback of such a system is that it is slow because each map must be drawn on the fly. Another drawback is that it is difficult to place type on a displayed vector map on the fly without interfering with the roads, highways, hydrology, cities, etc. Yet another drawback of a vector map is that a vector map looks more like a "stick map" than like a geographically accurate paper map.
Accordingly, a need exists for an automated travel planning apparatus for overcoming the above-noted drawbacks associated with existing travel planning systems.